We use customer journey mapping so that we can understand the audience we’re targeting with our digital marketing activities. If you want to see your business grow – this really is a key step.
- Why a customer spends so long browsing one page
- Why visitors put a product in their basket and then leave
- How visitors get from A to B
The root cause of many issues within a digital marketing campaign, is a lack of understanding of your customer journeys. In this post, we will explain all that you need to know about the customer journey, what it means and how you can map it.
What is a customer journey map?
In a nutshell, a customer journey map is a visual representation of the journey your site visitors take to achieve the desired goal. So, for example, how do customers navigate through your site before purchasing an item?
We use customer journey maps to have a clearer idea of your customers intentions, their needs and also their pain points. Now, this all sounds pretty simple, but it’s not enough to simply understand what your customer is doing on your site.
Instead, we highly recommend visualising their journey and placing it into a diagram that you can refer to throughout any CRO or digital marketing campaign. This is when you can start to map.
Here we have a typical example of how a user would progress through a site. We start at the awareness stage – where a user first finds your brand:
What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?
Customer journey mapping is a huge part of any conversion rate optimisation (CRO) campaign. It’s a way of breaking down the customer journey phase by phase and aligning each step with a digital marketing goal.
Anything you do as a brand should be about providing solutions for customers and helping them to achieve something as a result of your product or service. So, it makes sense that you need to really understand your target customer and their online behaviour.
The main benefits of customer journey mapping are:
You can establish a customer persona
When you start to work on your customer journey mapping – you might find that you’re not completely sure of the demographics of your audience. It’s important to make sure you’re not targeting an audience that is too broad or vague. You might find that you are wasting your digital marketing budget and not gaining many results.
That is why we recommend thoroughly researching your customers needs and paint points. Mapping out the journey of a typical customer will provide you with a clearer picture of the type of person who is going to help you reach your goals. With a clearer image of this customer – you can make sure your marketing is aimed at a specific audience.
You can improve your customer service
How does customer journey mapping improve your customer service? Well, it’s simple. A map is essentially a roadmap to your customers experience on-site. It will reveal moments when customers are benefitting from your site – as well as moments when they struggle to reach a goal or conversion.
Once you know more about their on-site behaviour ahead of time – you can start to plan your customer service strategy based on your findings. For example, you might find that a specific page requires a chat bot to help customers find quick and helpful solutions.
You can vastly improve customer retention rate
This goes without saying. When you have a solid view of your customer journey – you will find it much easier to pick out areas to improve. With the right improvements, you will be decreasing common pain points.
This means customers will not have to leave your site and go elsewhere. Customers are unlikely to be patient when it comes to things like site speed – so it is best to completely get rid of any potential for poor on-site experiences.
We suggest using your customer journey map to keep track of common actions that your site visitors complete. You can essentially predict what future customers will be doing based on previous customers behaviour.
Also, you can spot these issues before a user chooses to leave. In a nutshell – the less site issues you have, the more likely customers are to return and recommend your brand.
Maintain a customer-focused mentality
It can undoubtedly be hard to coordinate an entire team and practice the same values. A customer journey map is great because you can share it with team members in your organisation. Different departments will benefit from learning more about customer journeys – for example, sales and marketing.
A good customer journey map will cover each step of a journey, including pre and post purchase or conversion. As you’ve probably guessed by now – we really value customer journey maps. We’ve put together a few of our top tips to ensure you’re creating a beneficia map for your business.
How to create a clear customer journey map
Set your objectives for the map
Don’t just dive into creating a map – instead, ask yourself and your team why you are making one. For example, what goals are you hoping to achieve from the map? Do you want to understand a specific type of customer? Did one experience make you want to learn more about your audience?
Usually – we want to boost our conversions, which is only achievable if you know how to communicate with your audience.
Do your research
Research, research, research! You need to learn exactly who you are targeting – and customer feedback is the best way to do that. So you might want to conduct a survey, questionnaire, or user testing (or all three).
Some common examples of questions you might benefit from asking include:
- How did you hear about our brand or site?
- Why did you click on our site?
- What are you looking for? For example, do you need help answering a question or do you want a specific product?
- How long did you spend on site?
- What made you want to purchase our product? (If applicable)
- If you didn’t purchase, what was the deciding factor?
- Did you find it easy to navigate our website? – Top tip – could use a scale of 1-10 for this type of question.
- How could we make your experience better?
Highlight your target customer personas
There is probably going to be more than one persona relevant to your company. When customer journey mapping – it is important to only focus on one or two of the most important personas.
We suggest picking the most common type of customer and considering the route they would probably take when navigating your site. You can always create multiple maps for different personas.
Get in Touch
If you would like to ask any questions, feel free to get in touch with our CRO Agency London team. You can also check out our CRO services here.